Touring the Brooklyn Museum: An Art Explorer's Selection

Doubtless it is from professional deformation that this critic has, every so often, an irresistible dream. He is in a city unknown to him. On the top of a hill, there is an enormous house. He walks up to it. The door opens to his touch. He gets inside. Before him is an encyclopedia for the eye. The art of all times and all places is documented there, together with human nature in all complexities. What is on offer is nothing less than the world in epitome.

Give or take the hill, that is the impact of every major miscellaneous museum, worldwide. If it is particularly strong in the Brooklyn Museum, it is because after close to 100 years, the great building (by McKim, Mead & White, first opened in 1897) still seems to breathe with the evangelical fervor of those who founded the museum. Deep and slow are its inhalations, strong and benign its heartbeat.

What follows here is one person's elliptic and highly selective choice of what may be seen in the museum at any one time. (Extensive renovations will be begun before long, so that recommendations made here may not always correspond to what is on view at any given time.) In 1983, Robert T. Buck Jr. became director of the Brooklyn Museum after 10 years as director of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo. Not long afterward, the entrance hall on the north side of the museum established itself as one of the most welcoming, as well as one of the grandest, of New York's museum spaces. Lucky - though sometimes overtaxed - is the artist who gets to fill that space for a season. At present (and through Feb. 13) the artist in question is the Chicago sculptor Martin Puryear.

A master of carved wood on no matter what scale, he fills (but does not clutter) the enormous space with just two sculptures. One of them involves a huge but delicate wheel, the other a huge and doughty head. The wheel is in tandem with a rather smaller cone that keeps its distance, as if to echo a certain kind of human pairing. The head, though no more than adumbrated, secretes a tremendous power in its slumber. These are pieces that express, without representing, all manner of strong, contained emotion. The larger one has weight, but almost no bulk - a rare combination. Mr. Puryear is one of the best sculptors now working in this country.

Once through the noble spaces of the lobby, we find immediately to the right, and through March 6, a show called ''A Century of French Painting.'' This consists of just 22 paintings from the permanent collection. They cover a gamut that ranges from the marriage of Neo-Classicism with wild romantic fancy in 1799 to the abrupt, down-to-earth, all-seeing eye of Toulouse-Lautrec, almost 100 years later.

There are paintings in the show that leap to the eye as benchmarks for the history of European painting. (It is characteristic of the museum that at least two of them are not shown up front, in flamboyant style, but lodged way back and at the side.) The esthetic of early Impressionism has no more ecstatic monument than Pissarro's ''Climbing Path'' of 1875. As for Cezanne's ''Village of Gardanne'' of 1885-86, which the museum bought in 1923, it is the ancestor at a 30 years' remove of early Cubism as it emerged in the landscapes painted by Braque at La Roche-Guyon in 1909.

Other paintings speak for mainline Manhattan taste as it was represented by Mrs. Horace Havemeyer, who gave the museum two of the Corots and one of the Monets in the show. But the Brooklyn Museum has its full share of the curious and out-of-the-way paintings that give depth and perspective to the standard histories of art. One such is the majestic portrait by Fantin-Latour of Mme. Leon Maitre that the museum bought in 1906, on the advice of John Singer Sargent, from the artist's memorial exhibition in Paris. There is an instinctive amplitude of feeling in this painting, as well as a mastery of design and a wonderful way with period detail.

In the same category is the little ''Allegory of Pilgrimage'' by Thomas Couture, in which the brushwork has a speed and an immediacy that got flattened out when Couture worked on a mural scale. As for Fereol de Bonnemaison's ''Young Woman Overtaken by a Storm'' of 1799, it is one of the marvels of its date. For reasons unexplained, the young woman in question is down to her last layer of transparent gauze. Backed against a tree in a high wind, she eyes with understandable apprehension the onset of a storm that has had few rivals since the one in ''King Lear.'' It ought to be ridiculous, but it has a strength and a purity of vision that take us by the throat. Hard Choices Leaving until later the museum shop, which doubles as a cut-rate and admirably serendipitous antiques store, the visitor is now faced with some difficult choices. What the museum has on view at any one time is no more than a sample of the total number of objects - now estimated to be heading for the two million mark - that it owns. Its founding fathers wanted to gather within its sturdy four walls the whole world in embryo. In that ambition, they were fired up by a belief formulated by one of them in 1881.

What Joshua Van Cott told his fellow citizens was that in less than half a century no one of wealth and standing would think of living in Manhattan. ''The great Merchants of New York with their accumulations will have to cross over the great bridge,'' he said. Brooklyn, so soon to become ''the Home City of America,'' had to have ''everything that adds to the sweetness of life and the moral and intellectual influence of a great city.''

In the way of historical prophecy, we've heard better. But this was a noble notion, and one echoed in 1889 by the assistant secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, who told a select audience in Brooklyn that they ''had it in their power to decide whether, in the future intellectual progress of this nation, Brooklyn is to lead or to follow far in the rear.''

As for that, there are plenty of brainy people in Brooklyn today. The Brooklyn Academy of Music is as enterprising - if not more so - than its counterparts in Manhattan. But the ''great Merchants'' of Manhattan have not yet left it en masse, and it has to be said that when Mr. Buck took over the museum, it had not quite the talismanic status that its founders had envisaged. Yet if we keep our eyes open, there is no mistaking that this is one of the great international museums, and recognized as such by professionals, worldwide. Multiple Contributions And rightly so. Visitors to the recent Degas exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art will have noticed that two key exhibits - the early painting of ''Mlle. Fiocre in the Ballet 'La Source' '' and the huge, unfinished painting of a much later date came from Brooklyn. In the major show of Greek bronzes that is now in the Cleveland Museum, Brooklyn makes a distinct mark with its ''Running Hercules.'' In the recent exhibition of ''Cleopatra's Egypt'' in the Brooklyn Museum itself, the in-house contribution was one of the strongest.

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During Dianne Pilgrim's term as curator of the decorative arts - she is now director of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in Manhattan - she organized for the Brooklyn Museum two monumental exhibitions that amply fulfilled its founders' concern with intellectual progress. One was about design during the so-called American Renaissance in the late 19th century, the other about the art and artifacts of the first machine age in our own century.

The current exhibition of French 19th-century drawings at the museum includes many that have lain in their boxes since 1910. In ''Lacquer -a Panorama of Asian Decorative Arts,'' which can be seen at the Brooklyn Museum through June 14, all 66 of the exhibits come from the museum's holdings.

It would, in fact, be hard to name a mainline department of the arts in which Brooklyn could not muster a more than acceptable show from its own voluminous holdings. What is lacking is public awareness of their multiplicity. (Some idea of it can be gained from the handsome book called ''Masterpieces in the Brooklyn Museum'' that was published by the museum in cooperation with Harry N. Abrams Inc.) A Head of Napoleon In the way of enlightenment and instruction, a single object can set off a lifetime of investigation. In the French drawings show, just mentioned, there is a head of Napoleon by an unidentified artist that makes us see exactly why men would follow him to the ends of the earth.

Elsewhere in the museum, the first-century B.C. statuette of Alexander the Great, made in Egypt, is based on an image that has been famous since Plutarch spoke of the ''melting gaze'' in Alexander's eyes and the way in which his was inclined across his left shoulder. Better than any words, it brings us face to face with one of the great leaders of all time.

The ''period room,'' as such, is not always held in high esteem by connoisseurs, but the long series of such rooms that was installed by Ms. Pilgrim over the last 10 or 15 years has a cogency, and a finesse of detail, that is a continual stimulation. Anyone who wants to know what it has meant to act as an American in matters of decoration and design from 1675 until Art Deco in the late 1920's will get a good grounding here. Images of Brooklyn Brooklyn itself is not forgotten in the course of the museum's forays through time and space. From Francis Guy's villagey and unpretentious ''Winter Scene in Brooklyn'' of around 1820 to Georgia O'Keeffe's ''Brooklyn Bridge'' of 1948, the image of the city is often there in the background. There is, however, an even more telling instance of the rude energies and glad borrowing that characterized its growth.

This is the ''Century Vase,'' made in 1876 by the Union Porcelain Works in Brooklyn. A huge, full-bodied object, this is in effect a concise pictorial dictionary of American history as it was conceived at that date. Washington himself has pride of place, picked out in relief in white on a background of royal blue. But space is found for William Penn's negotiations with the Indians, the American eagle's easy way with bolts of lightning, the Boston Tea Party, the beginnings of industrialization and the invention of the telegraph and the sewing machine. Bear and bison make cameo appearances, too. ''This was America,'' we say to ourselves, in admiration of the vigor and the assurance with which the work was carried through.

That vase is almost as eloquent, in its way, as the ''great truimphal chariot'' that Albrecht Durer designed for the Emperor Maximilian in 1513. Durer's enormous (16 by 95 inches, on eight sheets) woodcut of this formidable vehicle is one of the great prizes of the Brooklyn print room, and of course Durer spared himself not at all when he undertook the commission. But neither did the anonymous Brooklyn porcelain makers.

In so large a museum - and one that is destined to grow much larger when the additions designed by Arata Isozaki and James Stewart Polshek are finally built - contrasts of style, date and medium can make the visitor quite giddy. Since it was bought in 1950, the monumental stone ''Life-Death'' figure, made in northern Veracruz somewhere between A.D. 900 and 1250, has been the culmination of the museum's Meso-American installation. It would be a neat trick to segue without a blink from the peremptory volumes of that figure to the glistening flatness of a 17th-century ceramic tile from Syria and on to the portrait by the Japanese printmaker Sharaku (active in the 1790's) of a famous Kabuki actor of the day.

And then how are we to move from the nine-foot-high 19th-century house post from British Columbia to the silk brocade banyan (or dressing gown) and matching waistcoat that were made up in 1820 from silk woven in Lyons just before the French Revolution? From the high beak and the intense graphic energy of the one to the subtle effeminacy of the other, there would seem to be no possible transition.

Another tricky move would be from the plastic and metal necklace designed by Elsa Schiaparelli in 1938 to the feathered hat that was made in Peru more than 1,000 years ago. (In the necklace, minutely simulated insects chase one another against a background of transparent plastic.) Nor should we forget that in the canon of human activities the word ''sculpture'' stands both for one of the most voluptuous of all Indian presentations of the female nude and for the bronze head of a longhorn steer by Solon Borglum in 1905. (Borglum made it for a former Mayor of Brooklyn who felt that as he owed his fortune - made in the leather business - in the last resort to cattle, he had better do something about it.) Cross-references of that kind could be carried on ad infinitum in what is not only a building of stately vistas and large unhurried spaces but also a repository that has few equals for the range and number of its holdings. Looking at a seated Buddha from 14th-century Thailand, I noted the hemispherical bump on the Buddha's head that stands for his boundless knowledge. Could my studies in Brooklyn have put me in that class? You never can tell. But when I researched the top of my head, it was just as flat as ever. Never mind! I'd had a great time, and so can you.

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A version of this article appears in print on January 13, 1989, on Page C00001 of the National edition with the headline: Touring the Brooklyn Museum: An Art Explorer's Selection. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe